ICC World T20 2014 : Match Preview – England Vs SriLanka

Sri Lanka have been one of the consistent teams on the big tournaments for the past 4 years. They have reached the finals of 4 world events. Their inform bowler is back to his merciless best and one of their young opener has taken all the viewers back to the 1996 world cup where Sanath Jayasuriya was murdering bowlers. They have won their two scheduled matches and if they win this one, they are almost through to the semi finals. On the other hand England have more things on their plate to worry about. Their bowling attack, which would be their strength normally, is struggling. Their team is almost a fresh looking one and apart from Eoin Morgan, Tim Bresnan and Stuart Broad, almost all of their players are playing in their first world cups. Their performances in the shorter formats of the game have not always been good and with already one loss, they would love to get going in the tournament.

Head to head in T20’s

England have lost three T20s against Sri Lanka and won one – the 2010 World T20 semi-final.

Weather Conditions

Chittagong is only ground of this World T20 where rain is expected to spoilsport. Despite of storms in the city at night, the match day is forecasted as sunny and clear with only a 10% probability of rain. Storms are expected on the match day and the teams should be having Duckworth – Lewis on their minds at all times.

Pitch

This stadium has seven surfaces for this tournament to avoid getting damaged and so totals have been remained high. That is why here track is on a bit quicker end than the Mirpur’s. It will be helping the spinners with a good help for seamers at the start.

Teams

England have many players who are clean strikers of the cricket ball. But many of their players don’t have previous experience of playing in Bangladesh which places too much pressure of Morgan and Bopara. But if one of their top order batsmen can set the platform, the likes of Buttler and Morgan can accelerate. When teams are stacking their teams with three spinners, England are struggling on the spinning options.

SriLanka are coming off the back of 2 consecutive wins. Their wins have been set up by Malinga and Mendis. The performance of Kushal Perara has masked the batting efforts of the team. Kumar Sangakkara is on a red hot streak and having missed out on the two matches, he would want to get going, considering this is his last T20 tournament. The same can be applied to Jayawardene and Dilshan. For the first time after his comeback, questions have been raised about the place of Dilshan.

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